Search

James II undoubtedly benefited at first from both the Hobbesian anxieties and attitudes generated in the first half of the 1680s. At the level of propaganda, the Tory view of Hobbes as the patron of sedition could be wheeled out to condemn opposition. In the thanksgiving sermons for the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor in July 1685, Henry Hesketh, preaching before the king, alluded to Leviathan as part and parcel of the republican consent theories that had motivated the rebels. More common were allusions to Hobbes's de factoism as a theory that had encouraged individuals to believe that they could seize the throne. John Goodricke preached to the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn that Mr Hobbes's state of nature ‘would justify all Wars, Rebellions, and unjust Invasions upon the Rights of Others’ and that his theory had been designed in the first place ‘to support an Olivarian Usurpation’. Thomas Wagstaffe similarly assaulted the thought ‘That every Man should enjoy the Benefit of Laws, and Society, and the King … should be in Hobs's State of Nature, and every Man had a Right to everything of His. And if a Man can but get together Men and Arms … he may lay Claim to the King's Crown and Dignity.’ But the condemnations again went hand in hand with the thought that the beckoning Hobbesian anarchy, however unnatural its genesis, required an authoritarian solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ‘LONG PAST’ OF PSYCHOLOGY It is not uncommon for histories of psychology to begin by quoting Hermann Ebbinghaus's dictum that psychology has ‘a short history but a long past’. This implies that until psychology became a science and acquired a history, it was uneventful. It suggests the long persistence of a stable paradigm, and in some respects it is true. It is indeed the case that from antiquity up to the nineteenth century most European philosophy of mind derived directly or indirectly from Aristotle's De anima. The underlying model of mind is a group of distinct faculties with a physiological basis, each located in a separate organ and each defined by its function. One can find evidence for this model as far back as the Homeric poems. Given systematic and philosophical form by Aristotle, it became the standard model of mind and lasted well into the modern period. For instance, the belief, explicitly held by Aristotle and implicit in Homer, that humans share with animals all of their psychic faculties except for reason would have been accepted by most thinkers of the eighteenth century. The aim of this chapter is to identify the key features of psychology's long past. This will involve a brief summary of Aristotle's De anima, followed by an account of the fate of the much less influential Platonic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tudors granted their pardons from a variety of motives and pretexts, to serve ends both implicit and explicit. Some they used to celebrate new beginnings; others they issued as tokens of gratitude. The Tudors employed pardons to present themselves as God's merciful justiciars and to help cement the allegiance of the governing elite. Pardons encouraged widespread complicity in the increasingly bloody system of justice that characterized the early modern state. Janus-like, they selected some to live and thereby sanctioned the death of others. But why, specifically, did some offenders receive pardon and others not? The necessity of conforming to widely shared perceptions of justice and mercy ensured that some would obtain pardon, but on what grounds did the Tudors choose the individual recipients of their grace? This chapter turns from the abstractions and macro-processes of state formation to look more closely at individual experiences of authority. It first examines the official correspondence surrounding pardons, petitions for mercy, and the pardons themselves to delineate the various characteristics of offenses and offenders that shaped these decisions. Some pardons freed the wrongly convicted, while others issued automatically from Chancery for crimes that the law deemed excusable; most pardons, however, remained gifts of royal grace, recognizing varying degrees of culpability, penitence, and potential for reform. The chapter then explores the processes through which petitioners sought, and sovereigns granted, remission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To those who are unfamiliar with the history of alchemy, the image of Isaac Newton poring over manuscripts illuminated strangely with dragons, sceptered gods, and couples copulating within flasks cannot fail to educe a strikingly discordant tone. How could such a great mathematical mind, the father of modern physics, concern himself with such seemingly unintelligible gibberish? Must we simply throw up our hands at the “superstitious” Zeitgeist of the age, as Newton's nineteenth-century biographers did, and conclude that he was deluded by the work of “a fool and a knave”? Should we conclude, with more recent scholars of Newton's alchemy, that he was engaged in a fundamentally religious quest in which alchemy would provide the key by which God's immaterial activity could be linked to the phenomenal world of matter? Or is there yet another answer - that Newton's alchemical research was primarily an investigation of the microstructure of matter, the forces of chemical affinity, and the ability of material substances to undergo radical transformation in the laboratory? Needless to say, the matter is not easy to decide, given that Newton copied, abstracted, commented upon, and composed about a million words of manuscript material on the subject of alchemy, over a period spanning more than thirty years. One thing, however, is sure: in order to understand Newton's fascination with alchemy, we must not consider the enterprise from an anachronistic viewpoint that equates alchemy with the irrational, the mystical, or the anti-mechanical. If we wish to comprehend Newton's deep involvement in this subject, we must have a firm grounding in the subject of alchemy as it existed in the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isaac Newton deserves to be included in a series of companions to major philosophers even though he was not a philosopher in the sense in which Descartes, Locke, and Kant were philosophers. That is, Newton made no direct contributions to epistemology or metaphysics that would warrant his inclusion in the standard list of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant - or even in a list of other significant philosophers of the era - Bacon, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Wolff, and Reid. The contributions to knowledge that made Newton a dominant figure of the last millennium were to science, not to philosophy. By contrast, Galileo, the other legendary scientific figure of the era, not only published the most compelling critique of Aristotelian scholasticism in his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, but in the process turned the issue of the epistemic authority of theology versus the epistemic authority of empirical science into a hallmark of modern times. Although Newton clearly sympathized with Galileo, he wrote virtually nothing critical of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy, and the immense effort he devoted to theology was aimed not at challenging its epistemic authority, but largely at putting it on a firmer footing. Newton made no direct contributions to philosophy of a similar magnitude. Indeed, from his extant writings alone Newton has more claim to being a major theologian than a major philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing about memories is less a way of finding out what actually occurred than what, in the fullness of time, one is capable of making of what may have done so. A personal narrative is what can be made of what may have happened; a personal narrative of war, then, is what can be made of remembered war. Men who write such narratives are makers, like poets (who are etymologically makers), and novelists, and all other constructers of words. But what exactly do they make? Are such narratives memorial gestures that fix and communicate public meaning, like war-monuments – the Cenotaph or the Marine Corps Memorial or the Menin Gate? Or are they a different kind of gesture, a different act of making? If we follow James Young, and take memorial to be the general term for a class of collective gestures of public commemoration, including material objects (monuments), fixed days (Memorial Day), assigned spaces (Valley Forge Cemetery), and even unique occasions (meetings, conferences), then we must surely say that the written recollections of the men who performed the acts that taken together constitute a war must also be memorials. But there are problems in the terms of that definition. In what sense are personal narratives collective? Are they generated by some common impulse beyond the personal? Are they conditioned by states of mind outside themselves? Do they individually belong to the art of public memory? Of national memory? Or are they a set of essentially private transactions between a man who was there and the things that happened where he was? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normal child is the most valuable member of the community, and whereas welfare work flourishes in most countries, and has everywhere aroused popular imagination and generosity, there remain the great questions of education and training, mental and moral, of the young … We want to protect and develop the normal child as well as the abnormal, weakly, or poverty stricken … We may point out that many women's organizations considered and passed in 1922 a children's charter setting forth the right of every child to have opportunities of full development. Developing a discourse The present preoccupation with child abuse and the discussion on the best means of protecting child life merely elaborate a rhetoric whose antecedents are in the nineteenth-century child-saving movement which flourished in industrialised nations. A study of international child protection organisations illustrates the continuity of such rhetoric which moved from a sentimental depiction of victims to a medico-social scientific discourse of children at risk that expanded the concepts of victimisation, exploitation and abuse. It is through discourse that social claims become persuasively defined and social conditions are identified and transformed into social problems whose advocates lobby for recognition of the priority of their claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the parish church at Doddiscombsleigh, fifteenth-century stained glass portrays the key rites of the pre-Reformation Church. Each of the seven panels is linked by a crimson line to the wounds of a central figure of Christ. The message is unmistakable. Through the rites of his Church, as administered by his priests, the Lord conveys his life to the believing community. Among the most crucial of these were the rites of passage, performed at the principal crisis points of human existence. The birth of a child was followed within days or even hours by its presentation for baptism. The glass at Doddiscombsleigh shows priest and infant at the font; an acolyte holds the service-book, and parishioners assemble to witness. According to a Cornish play of 1504, the waters of baptism removed original sin; they thus procured admission to the believing community. This belief explains the anxiety of parents to secure the rapid baptism of their new-born, as, for example, at Wembury in about 1535. Within a few years, moreover, the child would receive the sacrament of confirmation – usually, as is depicted at Doddiscombsleigh, from the bishop himself. Progressing to adulthood, he usually experienced the sacrament of marriage. At Doddiscombsleigh the hands of bride and groom are ritually linked by the officiating priest. Inevitably there was provision also for the ultimate crisis of human life. At Doddiscombsleigh a dying man receives the last rites from his priest; the latter holds a paten and is accompanied by acolytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout English history, the law, along with marriage, the church, and diligent management, has been reckoned by both contemporaries and historians as one of the principal means by which men of humble origins could hope to raise themselves into the national or at least the local elite. In this chapter, therefore, we will explore the economic prospects of members of the lower branch. The principal variables that must be considered are the differing levels of income of different groups within the profession, changes over time, and the relative importance of patrimony versus the fruits of professional practice in determining the success which individuals could achieve. As we have seen in previous chapters, the lower branch was in fact composed of a range of practitioners which stretched from the officials of the courts at Westminster to the country attorney who worked in a village in one of the more remote parts of the realm. Consequently, the prospects offered by a legal career were extremely diverse. The office holders were at the apex of the profession in terms of wealth, and, given the Elizabethan boom in litigation, it is certain that legal offices were steadily gaining in value throughout the period. For example, an assessment of members of the legal profession for a ‘loan’ to Queen Elizabeth in 1589 was largely disdainful of the wealth of the twenty-four cursitors in Chancery, but by the time of Charles I each of these places was said to be worth some £300 p.a. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1600, the enormous increase in litigation which had taken place since the 1550s began to produce concern amongst observers, both inside and outside the legal profession, that there were too many lawsuits. In the space of a mere half-century England seemed to have become an extremely litigious country. Exactly how litigious early modern society was can be gauged only by making comparisons with other periods. We know already that for two hundred years before 1550 litigation in the central courts was much lower than it was to become by 1550. Going even further back into the past, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, much legal work may have been done in local courts, but simple comparisons of the bulk of the plea rolls leave little doubt that central court business was nowhere near the level it was to reach under Elizabeth. For the period after 1640 and on into the eighteenth century, there is as yet no statistical evidence of sufficient quality on which to build a confident picture of trends in litigation. Cockburn's counts of cases heard by justices of assize remain high until the late 1660s and early 1670s, when a quite precipitous fall-off begins, which lasted well into the eighteenth century. But, since cases at assize were by definition cases nearing completion, such figures may not be a reliable guide to the number of causes commenced. Statements made by court officials to parliamentary inquiries give the quite contrary impression that litigation was still buoyant in the 1720s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The dominant historiographical tradition of eighteenth-century physical science presents natural philosophy as a coherent, unified body of theory and practice. The seminal texts of this tradition, Metzger's Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave (1930), Brunet's L'introduction des théories de Newton en France (1931), Cohen's Franklin and Newton (1956), and others, all picture natural philosophy as a set of discourses which are unified by their debt to Newton and their base in matter-theory. In this picture, Newton's legacy is constituted by the collection of his texts which the eighteenth-century natural philosophers absorbed, albeit selectively and in a highly interpretative fashion. The Principia, the Opticks, the ‘Queries’ to the successive editions of the Opticks issued in Newton's lifetime (1704, 1706, 1717), and the letters to Oldenburg, Boyle and Bentley, not published till the mid-century, havev all been taken by historians as starting points for the various aspects of what has nevertheless remained a single embracing tradition. Major eighteenth-century interests in the aether, in interparticulate forces, in the role of activity in matter, have all been interpreted in terms of various differing selections from these original texts. In this way, the problem of the object of discourse, and of the relation between that object and the natural philosophical enterprise, has been circumvented. Historians have adopted an approach whose method is profoundly unhistorical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What became of the literary traditions of ‘opposition’ drama after the closing of the London theatres? Clearly they did not continue either in the exiled Royalist theatre at Oxford or in the occasional surreptitious performances put on in the private houses of the nobility during the interregnum. The audiences and their interests were there too different: Fletcher, not Shakespeare, Jonson or Middleton, was the Cavaliers' favourite dramatist. But while suppression of the public playhouses crushed the old drama out of existence, the printing presses in the 1640s worked with a freedom and range unknown before. Among the thousands of tracts and pamphlets issued in those years and preserved in the Thomason collection, above all in the radical news-sheets, mani-festoes and pamphlets of the Leveller movement, the tradition of popular secular critical writing appears in a new and increasingly confident form. Leveller rhetoric intensifies the strengths of common speech. It is packed with proverbs and colloquial sayings, using concrete and sometimes coarse images from everyday plebeian life for vividness and wit. It is rhythmic, energetic and irreverent, as well as weighty and dignified when occasion requires. One of the main influences on Leveller style was of course the Bible – the only book many of the rank and file will have known well – and the plain preaching based on it. I want to suggest that some of the most effective writers were also inspired by the other great source of instruction and culture that had been open to ordinary Londoners: the theatres and the published texts of their plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]